The iPodfather

Who is Steve Jobs? Only the CEO of Apple, the leading consumer technology company in the world. No biggie.He's not an actor, musician, model or anything important like that, so why dedicate a blog to him?

I've previously not even given this guy a second thought. But Steve Jobs matters more than any celebrity, not merely for the fact that he helped to engineer the pretty MacBook that I'm typing this on.

A quick bio reads like this:

• Jobs founded Apple, out of his basement, and basically revolutionised personal computing.
• He was fired from Apple, the business that he helped create, in 1985.
• He went on to found NeXT (a computer company) and Pixar.
• Apple purchased NeXT and in 1998, Jobs was back at as CEO of Apple.
• From there till now, Apple has given the world the iPod, iPhone and iPad alongside several personal computers

Steve Jobs basically then, can be credited with the content that we study in this paper. For instance, the iPod introduced us to the first ultra-portable music player, which meant that you could carry your entire music library with you, with a ten hour battery life. Unheard of. On top of that, without Steve Jobs we wouldn't have had Toy Story or Finding Nemo. Eek.

Without these technologies, some of the current issues and debates would possibly not be circulating, such as Mark Bauerlein's concern's of "The Dumbest Generation", or more recently, the health risks such as hearing loss and pedestrian deaths associated with these technologies. Not to mention the issues of advertising, gender and many of the other topics discussed in this course.

Without Steve Jobs at the helm of Apple, would the phenomena of the personal computer of the ultra-portable mP3 player have occurred? Did Jobs merely accelerate the inventions? Or is he simply a face behind a collaborative effort?

In light of what I have discovered about Jobs, I would like to suggest that he has not singlehandedly, but in large part, transformed and moulded the present technoculture. He is The iPodfather.

Jobs for the (Play)boys

Yes, I'm a frustrated headline writer. Anyway, apropos of this week's topic, here's an interesting piece on the rather awkward way in which squeaky-clean Apple and squeaky-but-not-so-clean Playboy have come to a mutual arrangement for the iPad.

mMmMm..... Apples.........

As I lay me down to sleep, I give Steve Jobs my soul to keep, and if I die before I wake my 4th gen Iphone they won't take..... I wanna be buried with the thing!

Have people begun to create this new society where technology has turned into the new religion? Honestly I think they have. Take the.... Well the Ianything really, Steve Jobs has created a huge fan base for his technology and more importantly the 'apple' brand itself, from the first generation Ipod to the brand new Ipad people across the world line up for hours in front of stores in the freezing cold or boiling sun just so they can say they got their Iwhatever on the very day it came out. Never mind that if they waited 6 months they could get it cheaper and a version without all the faults and bugs that any first generation piece of technology is bound to have.

You can see from each of these videos the changes that Jobs has made in the way he addresses his audience (followers, congregation?) as the popularity of his techno-toys grew over the years. From the low key presentation of the first Ipod to the over the top revel of the Iphone he has gone from merely introducing people to a new piece of technology to create a giant spectacle similar to the televangelists you would see at 5am on channel 2 in the mornings. The way Steve Jobs talks about these products and the way people react to them you'd think he had just discovered the cure for cancer and was planning on giving it to the world at half price. Because at the end of the day, no matter how crazy people go for these products, they are JUST a computer or JUST a phone, they just happen to look a little sleeker and sexier than some of the other products out there.

Notes on the first lecture

So welcome to the class blog. Although we'll talk about the blog in more detail during the first tutorial, please don't feel you have to wait til then to start the conversation. Only the posts you select will be graded - so there's no risk in getting your toes wet straight away.

I want to begin with a follow-up to the first class yesterday. If you want to listen again to the word from Wordcamp on how to write for blogs—you know, the one that told us never to link by using "click here"—then, um, click here. It was great to hear some voices of dissent challenging this drive to streamline our language to the point of strangling it. What would be excellent is if others could share their views on what makes for good blog writing style either by replying to this post or posting anew.

Perhaps you want to relive the religiosity of the Very Reverend Steve Jobs launching the iPhone back in 2007 (sans my edits)? Thanks to Hugh for pointing out to me after the lecture that I had omitted to mention the resonances with the "Holy Trinity" (an ipod, a phone and an internet device; an ipod, a phone and an internet device; an ipod...)

The movie I showed the sequence from is Office Space (Mike Judge, 1999).

Finally, I highlighted some of the statistics in Technorati's State of the Blogosphere 2009 report. They organize their findings into Day 1, Day 2 etc. and you have to browse through these to see the kinds of stats I was pulling yesterday.

I have posted my ppt slides from the lecture on CECIL.

I'd like to encourage you to use this forum to discuss (and hopefully challenge and critique) the lectures, the readings and the debates in this class. I look forward to the conversation.